Word: blandness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...strapping man, and handsome as a juvenile lead, Clark Clifford was Harry Truman's nearest equivalent to a Harry Hopkins. He translated Harry Truman's ideas into bland, trudging prose, was the liberal wing's most effective advocate at the President...
Willie made out all right. In The Saracen's Head, London Daily Express Cartoonist Osbert Lancaster thrusts greatness upon his unwilling hero in a bland satire that good-naturedly kids the iron pants off the whole profession of medieval arms. Written as a juvenile, it is the kind of literary fare that parents will gobble up if they can get it away from the kids. The Saracen's Head can be read in an hour, but in that brief time Willie runs his shaky lance through El Babooni, the infidel champ, is knighted by King Richard I himself...
Politically, Quirino smilingly settled for a bland White House communiqué assuring the world that he and Truman had "discussed measures for the reinforcement and development of Philippine economy." The State Department showed only polite interest in Quirino's murmuring about a Pacific Union against Communism...
...type that it creates and satirizes, A Sea Change is something like Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, and like that book it is written with affection for the subject. But it has an art of its own that makes it rich and strange. The writer's humor can be bland and surreptitious, or broad and biting. Of Divver's punditry: "His views were not original, except in the field of military strategy and logistics...
...weakly on his throne (some historians think, on the contrary, that Borgia senior was quite handy at murder), son Cesare stormed and conquered numerous fortresses in Italy. Men who got in his way were ruthlessly disposed of by his Spanish henchman, Don Michelotto, or quietly turned over to his bland and terrifying secretary, Agapito, who, in Author Balchin's version, sounds comically like P. G. Wodehouse's inimitable Jeeves, and who removes undesirable Borgia enemies as distastefully as if they were Bertie Wooster's vulgar cravats and checked suits...